Natasha

This Woman's Life

June 21, 1998|By ANNE FARROW Anne Farrow is Special Features Editor for Northeast.

Join us at Hill-Stead Museum

on Wednesday, June 24!

The steel drum magic of

Pan Carib begins at 6:30 p.m.

Natasha's magic begins at 7:30 p.m.

In every poem, there are two things: something in the foreground, and something in the shadow, yearning to close the distance. Margaret Gibson wasn't speaking of Natasha Trethewey when she said that, but she might have been.

Her former student is, to growing acclaim, working to close the distance between the memories of her Mississippi childhood and the poetry it produced in her. She is working, too, to close the distance between her poems, which are all about the lives of women, and the suffering life of her beautiful, murdered mother.

It is a tall order, but Trethewey, who will be the featured poet in the Sunken Garden on Wednesday evening and then, later in the week, a bride in Virginia, is not daunted. There is a hidden world calling her to speak.

The manuscript poems appearing now in the country's top literary publications are populated by the women of her childhood the grandmother with whom she spent her summers in Gulfport, Miss.; Aunt Sugar, who taught her about independence and a love of home; and her mother, whose tragedy is a constant, shadowing presence.

``When I first started writing, it was to deal with this,'' says Trethewey, who just finished her first year as an assistant professor at Alabama's Auburn University, teaching creative writing. The heart of this is the death of her mother, who was a social worker and black, but this also includes the love story of her mother and her father, who is white. She is close to the story of her parents, who fell in love during college in Kentucky, and went over into Ohio to marry because in Kentucky in 1965, miscegenation was illegal.

``John Edgar Wideman said to me, `You have to write about what you have to write about,' '' Trethewey says, sounding grateful. ``I hope to find a way to do it. You have to be willing to admit how much you hurt.''

She was a small girl when her parents divorced, and she stayed with her mother, whose family history was in Gulfport. Now 32, Trethewey remembers feeling that she should stay with her mother, that her presence might protect her from harm. Her mother remarried and moved to Atlanta, where her daughter's touching prescience about protection proved true, in the most terrible way.

Trethewey was 19 and a sophomore at the University of Georgia when her stepfather, who had been jailed for an attempt on her mother's life, was released from prison, went to her mother's house and killed her. She was not quite 41.

``I think about my mother more and more as I occupy the ages she was,'' Trethewey says. On her 26th birthday, she remembered her mother's 26th birthday, and that she had a cake in the shape of a watermelon; the black seeds were 26 black candles.

In ``Hot Combs,'' a poem about the heated iron tool black women once used to straighten their hair, the poet writes:

I think of my mother's slender wrist,

the curve of her neck as she leaned

over the stove, her eyes shut as she pulled

the wooden handle and laid flat the wisps

at her temples. The heat in our kitchen

made her glow that morning I watched her

wincing, the hot comb singeing her brow,

sweat glistening above her lips,

her face made strangely beautiful

as only suffering can do.

Trethewey finished college and, because social work had been her mother's career, became a caseworker. She simply did not imagine a career for herself as a writer -- it is an assumption she works hard to correct in her black students at Auburn -- but in her mid-20s, at the urging of her father, poet Eric Trethewey, she began a master's degree at Hollins College.

Though he is less a presence in her poems than the women of her family, her father is key to her development as a poet. ``My father kept saying, `I know you can write.' If it weren't for him,'' Trethewey says, ``I might not have done this.'' When she fantasizes about having a poetry-world success, part of the fantasy is calling her father on the phone to tell him about it.

Not that she needs to fantasize about success. A month ago, Trethewey received a grant from her university to spend a month in New Orleans studying the lives of the quadroon and octoroon women who lived in the mixed-race bordellos of the city's fabled Storyville at the turn of the century. Inspired by an old photograph of one woman, Trethewey hopes to learn enough about the lives of these women to write a series of poems based on the life of one of them. And because the whole story is not the whole poem, Trethewey will reconstruct a life that is based on the facts of many lives, and will bring to her character, named Ophelia, the longings and imaginings of her own life.

``What stories can we tell from the lives of these women? I feel linked to them as a mixed-race person, and in looking to find a person from long ago,'' she says, ``I thought I might find or learn about a woman who would speak to my own internal life.''